Fast and Furious

“Fast and Furious” is back in the news. The reason? In January, Judge Amy Berman, an Obama appointee, ordered the Department of Justice to produce documents relating to the “gun walking” scandal that Congress had been seeking for four years. DOJ finally produced them, some 20,000 pages worth, this month. For anyone who, thanks to the Obama administration’s years of stonewalling, has forgotten about Fast and Furious, here’s the short »

I wrote last night about Judicial Watch’s bombshell revelation that Eric Holder’s office collaborated with the White House to try to force Sharyl Attkisson off the Fast and Furious investigation. (If you haven’t read that post, you should start there.) We know this because of this email thread, which was among the documents that DOJ produced to Judicial Watch. The thread is a conversation between Tracy Schmaler, Eric Holder’s press »

Judicial Watch has slowly been prying Fast and Furious documents out of the desperate grip of the Obama administration. The Department of Justice has now produced around 40,000 pages of documents–a tiny amount–which Judicial Watch has posted on its web site. So far, the most explosive document to emerge is an email thread between Tracy Schmaler, who headed Eric Holder’s Office of Public Affairs, and White House Deputy Press Sectary »

The Obama administration chose Election Day to give Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee more than 64,000 pages of documents relating to the Fast and Furious gun walking operation. These are documents that the House committee subpoenaed more than two years ago. The Obama administration alleged that they were subject to executive privilege and refused to produce them. The committee commenced a lawsuit to compel production, and on October 6 the »

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been trying to investigate the Fast and Furious scandal for years, but has been stymied by the Obama administration’s stonewalling. The House committee was willing to narrow its request for Department of Justice documents to an extraordinary degree; ultimately, the committee asked only that the Obama administration produce documents after February 4, 2011, relating to the false letter to Congress that bore »

As of September 2011, it was estimated that around 300 Mexicans had been killed or wounded with guns smuggled to Mexican drug cartels by the Obama administration in the Fast and Furious operation. That number has probably doubled, at least, since then. If so, it would not be far off from the 800 civilians–many of them in fact Hamas terrorists–who have been killed in the fighting in Gaza. It is »

The House of Representatives, as most of us recall, has demanded that the Obama administration produce records about its response to the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. President Obama refused to produce some of those records based on the assertion of executive privilege. He asserted the privilege even though, as I understand it, the documents in question were never provided to the president or his advisers The House held »

The Fast and Furious scandal has faded somewhat from the consciousness of even President Obama’s fiercest critics. How could it not, in view of the multitude of more recent Obama administration scandals. But Fast and Furious may return to the radar screen in light of this report: A high-powered rifle lost in the ATF’s Fast and Furious controversy was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of »

The two most honest and independent reporters in Washington are, I think, Jake Tapper, now of CNN, and CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson. I’m probably forgetting someone, but those are the two that come to mind. Ms. Attkisson reported on Fast and Furious more fearlessly and effectively than any other reporter. Today she disclosed that her personal and work computers have been “compromised.” The circumstances are being investigated: “I can confirm that »

Barack Obama’s comments about guns in Mexico today demonstrated a curious lack of self-awareness. “[M]ost of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.” So the violence perpetrated by Mexican drug cartels is our fault? That seemed to be the implication. But obviously, if there were not a single firearm in the U.S., the drug cartels would be just as well armed as they »

Gary Grindler, Attorney General Eric Holder’s chief of staff, has resigned from the Justice Department effective tomorrow. Grindler leaves after less than two years in that position. Grindler oversaw the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which led “Fast and Furious,” the failed and criminally stupid “gun-walking” operation that allowed Mexican cartels to obtain hundreds of illegally purchased weapons. The DOJ’s Inspector General faulted Grindler for hiding the connection »

Darrell Issa and Charles Grassley have been releasing documents that they have obtained in connection with the Fast and Furious investigation. I have not yet seen a site where the documents are actually published, so we have to rely on news accounts of them. If any of our readers are aware of a location where we can read them for ourselves, we would appreciate hearing about it. In the meantime, »

On nearly any other day, that would have been the headline. And who knows? Years from now, history may record that today’s most important event was the House of Representatives’ voting to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt by a stunning 255-67 vote. Among those voting “Yea” were 17 Democrats, so the contempt citation was bipartisan to a meaningful degree. The contempt resolution was, in my view, entirely »

It was reported tonight that last-minute negotiations between House staff and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice have broken down, which means that the House will proceed with a vote that should make Holder the first Attorney General to be held in contempt of Congress. CBS, like other news outlets, begins by misrepresenting the Fast and Furious program: The Department of Justice and House Republicans have been at a stalemate regarding »

Paul wrote here that he doesn’t buy the theory, advanced by Bill Whittle and others, that the real purpose of the Fast and Furious program was to lend support to the assertion that the weapons used by drug gangs in Mexico come overwhelmingly when gun shops in the American Southwest, so as to advance the political cause of gun control in the U.S. Paul’s arguments were cogent as always, but »

As John notes here, Bill Whittle is arguing that the Fast and Furious program was an effort by the Obama administration to increase bloodshed in Mexico and thereby lead to tougher gun control regulation in the U.S. This theory has been around for a while, and may receive a wider hearing now that Obama has asserted a weak privilege claim to prevent the disclosure of some Fast and Furious documents. »

At PJTV, Bill Whittle makes the case that Fast and Furious was driven by Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s anti-gun ideology. The case is, I think, a persuasive one, as no one has offered an alternative explanation of why the administration would deliberately facilitate the shipment of thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels, with no effort to track them unless and until they were involved in the commission of »